Boutique, 100% hand-made pickups, for guitar & bass

Here you will find some general, as well as technical information on GAS handmade pickups. And, why should you try GAS Pickups? Well, we give you 3 simple reasons:

1. Expand the tonal range of your electric instrument.

2. Upgrade your electric instrument's quality with 100% handwound, hand-assembled pickups, made from the worldwide best, hand picked materials!

3. Get more response at your picking hand. That means a wider "tone vocabulary", which will turn you to a better musician.

GAS Pickups - Making guitar & bass players happy...!

International customers (ordering, inquiries, info requests, etc,): Please e-mail us at gaspickups@gmail.com. We'll be happy to assist you and discuss your needs, in order to offer you the best possible solution for your instrument!

Retailer for Attiki and Greece: Music Accessories (www.musicaccessories.gr) shop!

Please scroll down on this page, in order to:

- Read our HOT NEWS,

- Find some interesting information about the design and production of our pickups,

- See some of our custom projects

Or be sure to visit the website's subpages, by clicking on the relevant knobs on top of this page:

- "Singles", "Buckers", "Bass" pages are Product pages and obviously feature more details about our products.

- "Users" page shows guitar- and bass-players who use GAS pickups, as well as luthiers and guitar manufacturing companies who use GAS Pickups on some of their products.

Sticky: Our GAS PAFoids in the "Legend" Version! Features:

- German Silver (copperless plated) long-leg baseplate

- Correct alloy slugs & poleshoes
- Correct alloy flat head Fillister screws (1010 & 1018 - depending on the model)
- "Butyrate" bobbins
- Brass bobbin screws
- Hand crafted maple spacers
- AWG 42 wire (Heavy PVA or Plain Enamel - depending on the model)
- German Silver (copperless plated, 0% chrome) cover in "antique" look
- Single braided hook-up wire w/thick clothed core
- Our unique magnet bars: Old specs (pre-1964 and 1964 MMPA), degaussed AlNiCo 5 bars (long or shorter rough cast or short polished - depending on the model) made in the US exclusively for GAS Pickups!

Hearing is believing!

When we decided to proceed with the manufacturing of guitar pickups, we knew that it was a really tough thing. But we made it even more demanding: We didn’t want to be “just another” pickup manufacturer. We wanted to produce fine, yet affordable guitar & bass pickups, covering a wide range in the sound spectrum of the electric guitar & bass, so that quite everyone would find his favorite one.

And then, we moved on.

Countless hours of studying (again, after 25 years!) the Physics, in order to be able to design properly: A guitar pickup is WAY MORE than just winding a coil…

Whole weeks of researching the world market for the best materials…

Dozens of mugs, full of coffee, really helped keep our heads in place...

All GAS Pickups are designed here in our lab, and they are hand wound and hand assembled! Further, all GAS Pickups' parts are made strictly in the US, Italy and Germany! We test all pickups one by one here in GAS, before shipping. And this is our main warranty to you!

Today, Spring 2021, more than 35 single coil models, 30 humbucker models & 9 bass models are under regular production (see in the relevant sections for more details), and others are under design. Also, for guitar players that need something very specific, many custom models are made.

For anything beyond, just contact us at gaspickups@gmail.com. Yannis, the engineer behind GAS pickups, will be happy to inform you about anything you wish to know!!

We knew… …but we took our chance!

The wire, which is used for the pickup coils, is one of the most important materials for creating good pickups, and also for keeping the consistency of the production line on a high level.

At GAS Pickups, we mainly use the P155 - Grade 1 "Polysol enamelled" copper wire from Elektrisola™ (AWG 42 & 43), a world leader in industrial wire manufacturing. The P155 is not just another copper wire. It furthermore has a thin tin layer over the copper (tinned before enamelling), that keeps the outer wire surface absolutely even, and ensures constant resistance and capacitance over length unit. And this is a crucial fact for perfect coils with maximum consistency.

Further upon, Grade 2 PVA AWG 42 copper wire from Elektrisola, is also used on some GAS models. This features a thicker insulation from the same material as the old Formvar® wire!

Last-not-least, the top-quality AWG 42 Plain Enamel wire from Elektrisola is also being used on some GAS models.

When deciding on the coil winding machine, it was clear that we needed a really professional, reliable solution, that would allow precise creation of the designed coils, as well as easy, perfect recreation of any of them.

That's why we finally went for the CNC mini coil winder®. That small unit, operated entirely from a PC, allows not only precise coil winding, but also perfect reproduction (since all coil designs are saved in its library directories). Further upon, automatic-, manual- and also scatterwound winding are offered. It's easy to operate and needs very limited space due to its small footprint.

Magnetic material sets important prerequisites for the main dynamic behavior of a pickup. In GAS Pickups we use AlNiCo II, III and V cast magnet bars & rods, and also OX Ceramic bars.

AlNiCo material affects also the inductance of the coils, and therefore the final frequency response of the pickup. The A2 & A5 magnet bars, which are used on out humbuckers, are made by the world's top manufacturers in the US (as Thomas & Skinner, AMT, Adams Industries), the same ones who delivered magnet bars in the 50's & 60's to the top US music industry brands!

All magnet bars and rods are strictly magnetized by our suppliers on our specs. Although, during our extensive quality control, poor magnetized bars & rods are trashed, and replaced with proper ones, in order to ensure the required field strength and homogeneity.

Metal parts used in humbuckers, like baseplates and covers, can be really disastrous for the sound, since these may sigificantly increase the Eddy currents and thus decrease the upper mids and treble response of the pickup. The effect appears mostly (but not only...) on cheap pickups.

The baseplates and covers used in the GAS humbuckers are made exclusively from high quality German Silver (copperles plated!), a material with extremely high impedance, in order to keep the Eddy currents as low as possible. Other small tricks, such as inslulating the magnet bar & poleshoe from the baseplate, do also help in reducing those currents.

Further upon, also all other metal parts in our humbuckers (fillister screws, slugs, poleshoes, mounting screws, etc.) are of the best available quality, ensuring proper function of the designed magnetic circuit.

The assembled pickup needs to be measured, in order for its correct functionality to be verified. However, to just measure its R-L-C data it's not enough at all. The frequency response is the main measure that will show if the pickup really works as it was designed to.

For this task we use the Lemme Pickup Analyzer, a PC based tool that allows precise measurement of the frequency response of a stand alone pickup, but also when connected to a volume and/or a tone control, with a cable, etc. Therefore, you can be sure that EVERY GAS pickup which leaves the house has passed such a high-grade quality & consistency control.

In order to keep GAS pickups as immune as possible against feedback, we do pot them inside a wax mixture (paraffine & bees wax).

Wax potting, however, affects the resonance frequency by lowering it for a few hundreds of Hz (depending on the model, the wax mixture and the potting time). Therefore, we have to consider this side effect into the initial pickup design, so that the final, potted pickup delivers the desired frequency response curve.

Note: We always pot our pickups in the old fashioned way, taking the desired time and temperature, ensuring the best results. No vacuum potting is used in GAS, because the pickup needs some time to get in the (higher) potting temperature too, apart from the wax, in order to allow to the wax to perfectly fill any space inside. This is not possible within the few seconds of the vacuum potting.